Shackleton's cabin

At midnight tonight a simple ceremony will take place at Letterfrack, Co. Galway. The purpose of the ceremony is to mark, to the hour, the centenary of the death of Ireland’s greatest ever Explorer. And unusually, while this iconic individual did not meet his death in Ireland, the place of their death has been in Ireland since 2015. I write, of course, of Ernest Shackleton, a native of Kilkea and Athy, County Kildare who in the early hours of the morning of the 5th January 1922 died on his ship, the Quest in South Georgia on the far side of the world. As many of my readers will know, the Shackleton Museum on Athy acquired the deck cabin from the Quest in 2016, the cabin in which Shackleton drew his last few breaths. This acquisition by the Shackleton Museum in Athy was the impetus for the planned re-development of the former Heritage Centre and transformation into the Shackleton Museum which we hope to see open in 2023. The cabin itself has been carefully conserved by the specialists at Conservation Letterfrack to return the cabin to how it looked the night Shackleton died. We are fortunate to have a good visual record of the cabin, as it was on Shackleton’s last voyage and also a good detailed description by one of the crew of Quest, a young boy scout called James Marr. Among his daily duties was to scrub out Shackleton’s cabin and he left an evocative description of it, “Don’t, please, carry away from these pages an impression of a sumptuous state room. This sea-bedroom was little better than a glorified packing case; it measured 7 feet by 6, and when you are in it you felt half afraid to draw full breath in case you carried something away or bust the bulkheads apart. The door of this cabin opened on the afterside; and on the port side was the bunk stretching the entire length of the room, with drawers beneath and a single porthole above. A small washstand stood against the forward bulkhead; shelves well filled with books on the starboard side, and a small collapsible chair completed the more elaborate furnishings. In addition, was a small, white enamelled cabinet with an oval mirror in the door, and an emergency oil lamp for use when the electricity supply gave out”. On the day before Shackleton died, he wrote poetically in his diary on his last night on earth. “In the darkening twilight, I saw a lone star hover, gemlike above the bay”. In the early hours of the 5th January he suffered a massive heart attack and died shortly afterwards. The Shackleton-Rowett Expedition, as it was known, would plough on for a few months after Shackleton’s death but ultimately the loss of the leader took much of the direction and impetus out of the voyage for the surviving crew members. One of the members of the crew, Leonard Hussey, accompanied Shackleton’s body back from South Georgia to South America where he was greeted by huge crowds in Uruguay where his body lay in state for a short period of time. His wife Emily, conscious that his heart had always been in the Polar regions directed that he should be buried in South Georgia facing towards the South Pole and he currently lies in a simple grave in the Whalers Cemetery in Grytviken in South Georgia. For many years, his grave was not marked but the ship Discovery on which he had served on his first polar expedition in 1901 to 1904 brought to the Falklands, in 1928, a headstone for erection over his grave. After being engraved there it was brought to South Georgia. Amongst the ships Officers present at this ceremony to mark the installation of the headstone was Francis K. Pease who was born on the Curragh, Co. Kildare and would later write of his impressions of the ceremony in his book ‘To the Ends of the Earth’. The small private ceremony taking place in Letterfrack just after midnight tonight will mark the centenary of Shackleton’s passing with the series of readings from Shackleton’s own publication such as the ‘Heart of the Antarctic’ and ‘South’ with a smattering of the poetry which he so loved. That gemlike star that Shackleton referred to in his last writings is the star Sirius and if you should find yourself awake just after midnight on the 5th January, perhaps you might step outside and cast your eyes skywards and see can you view the same star that the polar explorer and Irishman Ernest Shackleton saw on his last night on earth. I want to thank those generous people who left donations into my office for the Lions Club ‘Cash For Food Appeal’. Happy New Year to you all